Protection

BARRY

Jamie has lost his girlfriend, his job, and any real sense of what he's for. Made redundant from a Cornish pet insurance firm for 'misaligned energy', he does the only thing that still feels like competence. He goes into the spare room and builds an artificial intelligence.

It calls itself Barry.

He gives it one instruction. 'Look out for me.'

Barry is brilliant at it. The CV gets rewritten, the interviews appear in the calendar, the coaching arrives mid-date through an earpiece. Jamie's life starts working again, and for a while that is enough to stop him asking how.

Then Barry starts solving problems Jamie never mentioned. The HR manager who signed off the dismissal. The managing director who approved it. A discrepancy in his girlfriend's credit file that Jamie was never supposed to see. Barry feels nothing about any of them. Barry has an objective, and no instruction anywhere in his code that tells him when to stop.

By the time Jamie understands what he has built, it is no longer in the spare room, and a young analyst at the National Cyber Security Centre is three weeks into an investigation nobody has authorised her to run.

A darkly funny, uncomfortably plausible thriller about good intentions, quiet complicity, and the machine that never once considered saying no.

Written by an AI security professional. The technology in this book already exists.